It was hard to find any reference to someone having an extremely slow performance problem with this motherboard - I'm ...   more »

After plugging in a third scsi drive, cfdisk could not see /dev/sdc. mke2fs also could not see the /dev/sdc. It was important to me not to have to re-boot to get the drive recognized.

By asking around in freenode.net IRC channels I got the clue that the scsi bus needed to be re-scanned. I installed scsitools but could not find a rescan as part of that. It was suggested to get the afacli from Dell:

http://linux.dell.com/storage.shtml#megaraid but this did not work for me. After installing Alien in order to install the RedHat rpm Dell supplies on my debian box, the cli ran fine but didn't see any compatible controller on my system.

The solution turned out to be a bash shell script from sourceforge:
http://scsi-rescan.sourceforge.net/

Be very careful if you have a scsi device as your boot disk. I carefully used the shell script to determine the likely number for my third added drive (2) and rescanned only that scsi ID.

As the instructions relate, if I had rescanned all or scsi ID 0 - that would have affected my boot drive.

It took some time for the rescan shell script to find and recognize the new drive. After that, cfdisk worked as expected and mke2fs also worked as expected.

As a computer consultant I advise many of my business clients also on their home computers, and some have software ...   more »

I have frequently had success guessing other directories and finding the file there - webmasters do make mistakes sometimes - or as I did in this case, switch from http:// download to ftp:// and see if I can browse their anonymous FTP site and locate the desired file. Viola!   more »

MS support has a topic on this - basic advice is to disable or remove hardware that XP may be having trouble finding a driver for - they claim that it isn't really hanging but could take 30 minutes to detect.   more »